Articles
The Paradox of Empathy
Scott Jenson writes that empathy is a vague concept that isn’t strongly appreciated by others and while it leads to big, important insights, it usually starts with small steps.
Design Details: Instagram for iOS
A detailed look at the design of one of the most popular photo apps with lots of subtle use of motion and microinteractions.
Great Design Portfolios Are Great Stories
I’ve featured some great UX portfolios each week. Simon Pan, who was featured in week 1, gives advice on how to tell the story behind your work.
UX Tactics To Make Slow Things Seem Faster
Sometimes you aren’t on a fast connection or you’re loading a large file and you are forced to wait. Here’s some tactics to improve perceived performance and keep the user engaged.
Emotional Design Fail: I’m Divorcing My Nest Thermostat
Read how one person’s love of Nest early on turned into a feeling of repulsion when it let her down emotionally.
Invisible animation
Steven Fabre, Product Designer at Campaign Monitor, writes that good animation is invisible and you shouldn’t notice that you’re looking at animation while giving examples of what made the cut for their product.
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Tools & Resources
Designer’s Toolkit: Prototyping Tools
Cooper made a handy sort and filter tool to help you find the best prototyping tool for the job.
Origami 2.0
Facebook released a big update to Origami – a tool they use to design many of their products. Updates include being able to run prototypes on an iPhone or iPad, exporting code presentation mode, Sketch integration and much more.
Koala
Want to give your opinion on apps and websites and get rewarded for it? Koala is a new service built by Heist that gives people rewards in the form of gift certificates for doing user tests.
Design Principles
Learn about design principles and see how they can be applied from architecture to product design.
UI Magnets
Now you can take your typical whiteboard session up a notch with these huge phone shaped whiteboard magnets.
Media
2014 Blend Conference Videos & Slides
Blend Conference posted videos & slides from their event last September and there are quite a few UX related ones.
Designing for Humans (Video)
There are roughly seven billion people on this planet right now. There’s no way to address design without considering the needs of people, and sometimes it’s easy to forget just how many different kinds of people there are.
Happy World IA Day (Video)
Last Saturday was World IA Day which helped bring people from different communities together around a common theme to further the global conversation about how we practice and teach information architecture. This is a short video to help promote it.
UX Portfolios
Maggie Bignell
Maggie Bignell, Product Designer at Pocket, has a great portfolio that explains type of project, her role, timeline, and process.
Last But Not Least
FYI I’m a Graphics Designer
Hollywood doesn’t take graphic designers seriously.
“Usability is not a quality that can be spread out to cover a poor design like a layer of peanut butter.”
— Clayton Lewis
